Protesting personal protective equipment is sooooooooo American

These guys don't protest helmet rules

In 1981, I was a staff writer at the Elizabethtown Chronicle. I was assigned to write about the anti-helmet law demonstration at the state capital. I was the only motorcyclist on staff and always wore a helmet, so I was not sympathetic with the demonstrators.

I wrote about the demonstration and reported the opinions of the demonstrators as accurately as I could. I remembered some of their arguments from a decade before when I heard the arguments against wearing seat belts. The protesters insisted that riding a motorcycle was just as safe with or without a helmet.

Since it was a weekly newspaper, I had a chance to update my story the next day with a report of the death of a motorcyclist leaving the rally riding home in the middle of the night with a blood alcohol level that made him legally drunk. He died of massive head injuries. Since he was dumb enough to drive a motorcycle while drunk his lifespan was probably destined to be short anyway.

Personal protective equipment has always been controversial in freedom worshipping America. We are free to be as stupid as we want to be. We do not want people to tell us to wear masks or seatbelts or helmets or safety glasses or wash our hands.

We wear personal protective equipment for ourselves and for those who love us and for those who could be hurt if we don’t as in the case of facemasks. The trouble is there is no dramatic feedback for safety. We wear a seat belt and walk away from an accident that could have killed us.

There is an old proverb that says above all do not become a proverb. Do not be that blind man who refused safety glasses at work. And do not be the motorcyclist who protested helmet laws and died on the way home of massive head injuries. Fifty years post mortem you are still a proverb.

Fighting Frigates and Main Battle Tanks Have Some Things in Common

B-13, "Bad Bitch" my tank, 1975-78

The Movie Poster

Royal Navy frigates in the early 1,800s and modern main battle tanks have a few things in common. For instance, if you want to increase morale on a fighting ship do more got to re-practice. Firing cannons and small arms makes the crew happier.  For the past year I have been reading the Master and Commander Series of novels by Patrick O’Brian. I am now reading the 20^th novel in this series which is the last novel by O’Brian himself. There is a short 21^st novel. O’Brian died while writing it in the year 2000. It was finished by a friend of the author.

I watched the movie long before I knew that the novels existed. The movie Master and Commander starring Russell Crowe debuted in 2003. I have watched it several times sense including just last week. Now that I have read nearly all the books the movie is a pretty good summary.

As I read the novels, I thought a lot about life in a tank. Asked with the frigate the crew is very close together. Both of the main battle tank and a frigate are fighting machines designed around getting their cruise to the battle with as much firepower as possible. As with the movie Fury, many crew members of frigates Think of sailing a fighting ship has the best job they ever had.

In sea battles between wooden frigates can last for hours, but they can also be as short sharp and violence as modern tank battles. The battles are often at very close-range including boarding and fighting hand to hand until one ship surrenders.

In the 4000+ pages of the 20 novels the author spends a lot of time describing sailing in excruciating detail. He knows how every sail on the ship is rigged and used to make the ship faster and maneuver it. He also follows the two main characters through their entire professional lives. Capt. Jack Aubrey and Dr. Steven Mathurin are very different man who develop a lifelong friendship that the novels follow. They go through great ups and downs of fortune and love and loss in success and failure.

And as with the sailing novels my best friends of my life I met while serving as a tank commander.

I had no particular interest in sailing before I read the first novel. But after I started reading the story was so good, I read 20 novels inside of a year. I could not recommend more highly. And if novels are not your thing the movie is wonderful.

Gettysburg: Corona Movie Seven

The next movie in our Corona Virus Film Festival at home is the movie Gettysburg.  Clocking in at more than four hours, we split the viewing between two days. 

I saw the movie when it was released in 1993 and again early in the 2000s on DVD. I had forgotten how long it is and how didactic. Throughout the movie are speeches about why both sides are fighting the war. I think anyone who is sympathetic with the Confederate cause would find these speeches painful. I liked them and I don't like anything about the rebel cause. 

In the course of the movie, the professors who take up arms are treated with respect.  Learning in general is treated well.  There is a strong anti-intellectual strain in American life, but in this movie the learned men like Colonel Chamberlain are treated with respect and last-in-his-West-Point-class George Pickett is the butt of jokes.  The scene in which Pickett denies evolution is wonderful.  The scene in which General Hancock talks to Chamberlain about his friend General Armistead is beautiful and sad. 

For spectacle, the movie is just amazing. Hundreds of re-enactors line up shoulder to shoulder to attack Little Round Top. Thousands march across a mile of open fields at the end of the movie in Pickett's charge.  Dozens of cannon fire rolling barrages from the Confederate guns, answered by dozens more on the Union side. 

A quick search of "Lee Longstreet Gettysburg" shows the deep debate about how the double disaster of Little Round Top and Pickett's Charge happened. It also shows how the disagreement portrayed in the movie and the novel on which it is based could have unfolded between the two men. 

My first visit to Gettysburg was just a year after I returned to America from three years as a tank commander on the East-West border in Germany. We spent a lot of time training at or near the border deciding where our tanks should be placed for the best field of fire. Anytime my tank was on the move in the German countryside, I was scanning for a place to get out of the line of fire of an approaching enemy and looking for where to go if an attack suddenly occurred.

With my head full of fire and maneuver, seeing the route of Pickett's attack was stunning.  How anyone survived that assault, I don't know. 

The movie shows Lee believing his men could cross that mile of open field sloping upward and prevail over men with cannon hiding behind a stone wall. As an American, I am glad Lee was bold to the point of foolishness.  The defeat at Gettysburg was certainly not the end of the will of the slave-owning states to fight, but it was the end of any real hope for victory, and for that I am endlessly grateful.